On the first day of confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee attack Kagan for having associated herself with that notorious outcome-oriented judicial activist Thurgood Marshall (via having clerked for him and having made it publicly known that he is one of her personal heroes).

As confirmation hearings on Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court proceed, Senate Republicans continue blustering through their arguments — even going as far as to lambast Kagan’s clerkship under Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American justice. Today, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) echoed classic Republican talking points under President Obama, lecturing the Supreme Court nominee about how Americans are “losing freedom,” and how we were more free “30 years ago.” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) then responded to Coburn by pointing out that Coburn’s idea of a more “free” society was when women had fewer rights:

KLOBUCHAR: I was really interested and listening to Senator Coburn. … He was actually asking you, just now, back 30 years ago if you thought that we were more free. … But I was thinking back 30 years ago, was 1980. … And then I was thinking, were we really more free, if you were a woman in 1980? Do you know, solicitor general, how many women were on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1980?

KAGAN: I guess zero.

Sen. Coburn also threatened to filibuster Kagan’s nomination, telling ABC News that she was “ignorant of Constitutional principles”:

“I think the thing that’s very worrisome is that she has a very expansive view of the Commerce Clause, and I find that she’s ignorant of the Constitution’s limitation of that, especially what our Founders wrote,” Coburn, R-Okla., told us.

“And her reliance was that, ‘Well, here’s the precedent that’s been set, and we can’t go back to original intent,’ which comes back to another thing that she said earlier in the hearing — is that precedent trumps original intent. And I think most Americans would reject that. If that was the case, then we would have never had Brown vs. the Board of Education, and Plessy-Ferguson would still be the law. And to have a Supreme Court nominee that actually says precedent trumps original intent is worrisome, in my opinion.”

Coburn joins fellow Judiciary Committee member Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), who said yesterday that it was “hard to say” whether he would have supported Marshall. As Salon’s Steve Kornacki noted, “That’s a rather stunning statement when you consider the dynamics of Marshall’s 1967 confirmation.” Only 11 senators voted against Marshall, and their opposition “had everything to do with race — and, more specifically, with lingering white Southern resentment of the court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling (in which Marshall, as the NAACP’s chief counsel, had played a leading role).” All 11 were White and Southern, and most had signed the “Southern Manifesto,” a pro-segregation document drafted by the late Sen. Strom Thurmond.

So tell me again how all that civil rights legislation only passed because Republicans pushed it through over the tooth-and-nail opposition of Southern white Democrats?